Exploitation as the Unequal Exchange of Labour: An Axiomatic Approach∗

In subsistence economies with general convex technology and ratio-nal optimising agents, a new, axiomatic approach is developed, which allows an explicit analysis of the core positive and normative intuitions behind the concept of exploitation. Three main new axioms, called Labour Exploitation in Subsistence Economies, Relational Exploitation, and Feasibility of Non-Exploitation, are presented and it is proved that they uniquely characterise a definition of ex-ploitation conceptually related to the so-called “New-Interpretation